‘They didn’t look at themselves as I do. They didn’t feel as I do. How could they? I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world. And I don’t want to hear, when I’ve had an encounter with some mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men’s minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don’t want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it’s hard enough to come by) of a life that isn’t full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date …’

‘Isn’t it?’ she said, smiling.

‘No, because the dream of the golden age is a million times more powerful because it’s possible, just as total destruction is possible. Probably because both are possible.’

‘What do you want me to say then?’

‘I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be new …’ I saw the look on her face, and said: ‘You are saying that nothing I feel or think is new?’

‘I have never said …’ she began, and then switched to the royal we … ‘we have never said or suggested that further development of the human race isn’t possible. You aren’t accusing me of that, are you? Because it’s the opposite of what we say.’

‘I’m accusing you of behaving as if you didn’t believe it. Look, if I’d said to you when I came in this afternoon: yesterday I met a man at a party and I recognized in him the wolf, or the knight, or the monk, you’d nod and you’d smile. And we’d both feel the joy of recognition. But if I’d said: Yesterday I met a man at a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought: Yes, there’s a hint of something — there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape — terrible perhaps, or marvellous, but something new — if I said that, you’d frown.’

‘Did you meet such a man?’ she demanded, practically.

‘No. I didn’t. But sometimes I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across, they’re split, means they are keeping themselves open for something.’

She said, after a long thoughtful silence: ‘Anna, you shouldn’t be saying this to me at all.’

I was surprised. I said: ‘You’re not deliberately inviting me to be dishonest with you?’

‘No. I’m saying that you should be writing again.’